I love the simplicity of this drawing by Jean-Xavier de Combeloup. This sketch of Saint-Sebastien, in a graceful, languished and suffering pose, is somewhere in between the classical depiction of the martyr and an anatomical plates. Arrows are pinpointing various places of the body and naming them with a letter: these letters compose like an anagram of death and eros, they call for a meditative gaze, a gaze magnetized by this beautiful and resigned face, by the curves of a juvenile body, by the sensual melancholy of a myth deeply rooted into the European cultural imagination and irradiating it with the harmonics of a subtle desire.

Thanks to Nicole Canet.

Re. Jean-Xavier de Combeloup, you could buy the Exhibition catalogue From Vesuvius to Atlas. Drawings, pastels, paintings: here